View PDF version of this page

As often as I think now of that glorious vision, the thrill it produced in me still repeats itself. Part of it was due to the mere sensuous qualities of what I looked at—to the colour, the crisp outlines, the bold gigantic distances—but as much or more was due to a multitude of vague associations, which suddenly rose in my mind like a swarm of disturbed bees. Asia Minor—the very name was a spell. The whole lyre of classical poetry trembled at it through all its strings. Beyond those distant peaks, Apollo, Pan, and Marsyas made their music amongst the Phrygian highlands ; and ' bound about with trees,' as Catullus sings, there too, under Dindymus, were the ' shadowy places ' of Cybele ; whilst far to the north-west, the white wild swans of Ovid fluted their dying songs to the reeds and shallows of Ma;ander. Snatches of hexameters and pentameters, mixed with English melodies—sometimes many to-gether, sometimes singly—like notes loosened by the different stops of an organ, filled my mind with a tumult of noiseless music, as I breathed the breath of the wild thyme and the myrtle. Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and com-panies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature. To the poets, whose verses at that moment came to me, no acknowledg-ment, I felt and I feel, could have been excessive. 92 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

View PDF version of this page